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Broadwell vs. Haswell – part 3: wPrime

Part 3 in our article series of highlighting the advances on the CPU market brings us to yet another benchmark – wPrime. Basically, wPrime calculates prime numbers for the fun of it, much like SuperPI calculates decimals of Pi. It is a synthetic benchmark, meaning it necessarily has no bearing on real-life performance.

MSI Notebook model

Q2 2015

Q3 2015

G/P series (all)

Intel Core i7-4720HQ

Intel Core i7-5700HQ

GT72/GT80 (option)

Intel Core i7-4930MX

Intel Core i7-5950HQ

The benchmark is multi-threaded and will use all available CPU threads – once you let the benchmark know. In our case, we set the thread count to 8, which both our Haswell and Broadwell CPU has, and run a 1024M calculation.

Two things become apparent – one is that the newer Broadwell is a lot faster. We’ve seen this before in Cinebench and WinRAR, but not by these margins. Another thing is that the older Haswell-based i7-4720HQ is a bit more inconsistent over three runs, although not by much at all.

In any case – the victory is a walkover. The i7-5700HQ cuts almost 40 seconds from the calculation time of its predecessor. Once more though, it should be stressed that the wPrime benchmark is completely synthetic, unlike our previous benchmarks. It’s still three out of three for i7-5700HQ over the i7-4720HQ.